Now, I've given this topic some thought, in part because, for a while, I
was planning to write a Webapp to track wine cellar contents and write
reviews, myself. But I recently backburnered it, because of the launch of
Cork'd. And I think that, ultimately,
Cork'd will be a winner, though not necessarily in the way that Alder
thinks.

Alder assumes that all of these wine sites are trying to build a critical
mass of users and wine reviews to counter the influence of
the Park-tator. This is a laudable goal, but I agree likely to fail for
all the reasons he mentions. However, I don't think that this is Cork'd's
intent. And the reason Alder misses this point is because—to borrow terms
from Clay Shirky—he's
still thinking in terms of Web School practices. Cork'd, on the other hand, is
Situated Software.

What do I mean by that? The intent of Cork'd is not to amass a huge
collection of wines or reviews, though that may end up being a significant
side-effect. Its intent is to allow users to make recommendations to their
friends. Cork'd lets you identify your drinking buddies as your
own small community within the larger Cork'd community, and then you can make
recommendations to your drinking buddies. The cool thing about this is that
you can ignore the crappy reviews from the people you don't know or trust, and
just collect recommendations from the people you do know and
trust.

So users will visit Cork'd because they want to know the preferences of the
people they trust, and will want to share their own recommendations with their
buddies. Creating personal relationships is a much more compelling reason to
return to the application than the old idea of building status among the entire
community. And with their emphasis on sharing with your friends, I don't think
that building a large corpus of content was even something that crossed the
designers' minds when they created Cork'd. They just wanted to have a way to
remember wines that they had recommended to each other, and to let other
people do the same.

So, in a sense, I think that Cork'd does address Alder's points,
if only by taking a completely different approach to the Online wine app.
Because it's not a site that's about reviewing wines, it's about sharing with
your friends. And as sites like Flickr and LiveJournal have shown, this is
where the action really is.

As a side note, I do think that Vinography's comments
about CellarTracker are spot on. It is a potentially
powerful resource, but its UI must be the single worst I've ever
seen. That was why I was thinking of writing my own Online Wine app,
to be able to keep track of my own cellar and to let others do the same, but
to make it a more enjoyable experience than one can currently get with
CellarTracker. I only wish that I'd thought of so many of the ideas in Cork'd
a year ago and made it happen, so that I could get the benefits of Cork'd
and track my own wines like I could with CellarTracker. But for now,
I'm just sending feature requests to Cork'd and watching to see how things
develop.